


Rebirth

by CertifiedPissWizard



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: :), Character Study, Gen, This isn't how science works but i dont care, Yes! That's right! More potential Raphaella backstory!, also angst, and while raphaella could be extra enough to just make wings for fun, i smelled a chance for angst, shes from a world thats just wingfics, there isn't explicit violence but there is mentioned religious violence from the government, this is inspired by a line in revenge of the spaceport mahone, where jonny said that something broke in all the mechs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23188849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CertifiedPissWizard/pseuds/CertifiedPissWizard
Summary: They cut off her wings. They cut off her fucking wings. They’re gone. Her wings are gone, and she is grounded. She can’t soar through the skies anymore. She didn’t even do anything wrong. She just wanted to make the world better, that’s why she was doing her research. She was going to cure it, the sudden molt syndrome. She was going to make everything better. So what if she was experimenting to the jays. Sacred birds. The only birds which can get sudden molt syndrome. She was going to save everyone. She was going to fix things. They grounded her. Her wings, her beautiful wings are gone. Walking is hard, missing those pounds upon pounds of weight. She can’t balance. She can’t fly.
Relationships: Raphaella la Cognizi & Jonny d'Ville
Comments: 3
Kudos: 76
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	Rebirth

They cut off her wings. They cut off her fucking wings. They’re gone. Her wings are gone, and she is grounded. She can’t soar through the skies anymore. She didn’t even do anything wrong. She just wanted to make the world better, that’s why she was doing her research. She was going to cure it, the sudden molt syndrome. She was going to make everything better. So what if she was experimenting to the jays. Sacred birds. The only birds which can get sudden molt syndrome. She was going to save everyone. She was going to fix things. They grounded her. Her wings, her beautiful wings are gone. Walking is hard, missing those pounds upon pounds of weight. She can’t balance. She can’t fly. She looks up at the sky in the prison she was placed in. She misses it with a fierceness. She aches with the loss, how it burns within her. She looks at her other prisoners, ones still with wings, ones who are trusted to stay on their honor, while she is thought to have none to her. Sacred birds. Just because some bird god gave her people wings so many years ago she was thrown into jail for trying to protect her people by experimenting on those birds. She wasn’t being cruel, wasn’t being inhumane. Her wings are gone and she is so terribly lost and does not know what to do. Her second home is forever closed to her, even when they let her out of this prison of metal and concrete and cold. 

Metal. Metal. She isn’t an engineer. Still, maybe there’s something there. Maybe they can’t lock her out of the heavens forever. Maybe she’ll soar free through them again. She isn’t an engineer, of course. This will be somewhat of a challenge for her, but it is still possible. It’s still something she may be able to do, something worth doing, worth trying. Metal wings. She grabs books from the prison library, reads them in her cell. She will not share this thing that she is designing with her world and their small minds and petty attempts to punish her for her altruism. They do not deserve this. She has been spat upon, isolated, ostracized, cut from that which is most inherent to her being. This is something that is for her and her alone. Raphaella la Cognizi sits in her cell with a book on hydraulics and swears to herself that she will touch the sky once more. They’ll probably let her have all the metal she wants, all the tubing. After all, it’s impossible to make wings. They will watch and they will laugh. She will succeed, and then she will be the one laughing. 

She reads books upon books, hydraulics, bioengineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, medical books, books about the nervous system. Raphaella’s eyes swim with the words, she dreams in those words, sees those figures and charts as she drifts off to sleep at night. She doesn’t stop, though, and continues to eat up bit after bit of knowledge. She rereads books about wings, flight, feathers. She reads about physics. She reads about muscles. She makes sketches, makes ideas, stays up late planning and trying to design her freedom from being earthbound. They will not keep her down, she swears to herself. She was meant to fly and she will fly once more. Her first attempt is a failure, as are her second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. She is given more supplies. They whisper about how she’s gone mad without her wings. They whisper that her heresy condemned her to this, to trying to recreate the gifts of god. She does not stop, does not give up. They will not keep her from her home, will not keep her from the clouds and moon and stars. Once she has her wings she’ll fly away, build herself away off of the planet. She works. She crafts delicate metal feathers. She creates motors and tubes and mixes up hydraulic fluid. Her hands are covered in oil which sinks into her clothes, stains her hands.

“They’re too heavy for the energy source.” Flight takes energy. That’s why she eats less without her wings. She works on lightening the wings, making the energy source more powerful. She revolutionizes different fields and does not share her knowledge and is not asked to. She hovers three inches off the ground. It doesn’t last long. The guards are startled. She keeps working. The wings are too fragile. They broke after the attempt. She needs to make it so that they are self repairing. The guards, the warden, anyone, could steal her wings from her. She needs to stop that as well. She needs to make them more efficient so that she can place them into herself. She needs to redisgn the feathers to make them silent. She needs to make there be feeling in them. She works and works and works and does not stop working. Raphaella is determined, and this project has woven its way into the core of who she is. She cannot simply be content without her wings, cannot rest with hovering for short times, cannot be fine with having to fix them after each usage. She cannot sleep with the looks the guards have when they see her attempts. She cannot be calm when they talk of her heresy, of removing her hands so she may create no more heresies, cutting her tongue out so that she will speak no more heresies. She hurries in her work.

It’s the middle of the night. She has been separated from the sky for ten years. She sets up the mirrors, grabs her wings, the scalpel, the antiseptic. It will work or she will die. They will not stop her. She slices into the scars where her wings once were one at a time. She goes deep to the muscle. It hurts. It’s the same agony she felt when they severed her wings from her. This time there is a manic joy hiding underneath it, however. She will touch the sky once more. It is unweildy, slipping the wings in, holding them still long enough for them to sink their way into her flesh, to curl their way into her nerves, nanobots of her own design building bridges and holding them while stimulating the growth of new nerves and muscle so that one day the connections will be truly organic. She feels her skin do the unexpected and seal around the wings, growing flush with them. She does not go into shock, a risk she felt was there. She stands, flexes them. She can improve upon them later. As is, she sees the metal of her new feathers in the dim light, feels the comforting weight on her back. She spreads them out and feels where they brush the walls. She suppresses a laugh of joy. She eats the apple she snuck with her, and then she leaves. The free reign they gave her because of her flightlessness has never been more of a boon. She steps outside and takes off.

She flies until she grows tired. She flies still, and she falls. She should have died upon hitting the ground. She sits up. There is no blood on her, but there is blood on the dirt behind her. She is uninjured, as are her wings. “Well isn’t that interesting.” A voice from behind her. There’s a scruffy looking man with insane eyeliner. “Jonny d’Ville. I don’t suppose you ran into a Dr. Carmilla?”

“Who?” She barely keeps the laughter in that kept escaping while she flew.

“Nobody important. Want to get off this rock? It’s boring. You don’t seem boring.” He knows something, she knows. He knows how she did it, probably knows more.

“Lead the way.” He starts rambling, but Raphaella can barely hear him over the joyous pounding of her heart. She’s going to fly away. She’s going to be gone. Who knows? They might make a god out of her. She starts laughing. She’s going to be free.


End file.
